VITRO:Virtualized dIstributed plaTfoRms of smart Objects

VITRO:Virtualized dIstributed plaTfoRms of smart Objects

Virtual Sensor Networking (VSN) is an emergent approach that aims at providing support for collaborative multi-purpose WSNs. VITRO main objective is to extend and realize the concept of VSN and increase the reliability and deployment simplicity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), a missing, yet crucial link between highly heterogeneous wireless sensors and actuators platforms.

"Virtual Sensor Networking (VSN) is an emergent approach that aims at providing support for collaborative multi-purpose WSNs. VITRO main objective is to extend and realize the concept of VSN and increase the reliability and deployment simplicity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), a missing, yet crucial link between highly heterogeneous wireless sensors and actuators platforms. VITRO will develop architecture, algorithms and engineering methods and toolsets, which will enable the realization of scalable, flexible, energy-efficient and trust-aware VSN platforms. Hence, VITRO will increase the reliability and boost deployment of cooperative, virtualized smart communicating objects.

To achieve these objectives, VITRO enabled platforms will:

Provide a homogeneous abstract appearance to enable federated collaboration with external entities and thereby extending the networking degree by several orders of magnitudes.

Simplify the discovery and management of the underlying hardware and software resources of large collections of heterogeneous smart objects.

The VITRO outcomes will be packed in a VITRO application toolbox, consisting of middleware, advanced core communication components and a user-friendly management tool, which will enable easy configuration and instant support for deploying VSN applications. Although VITRO aims to be application-neutral, the proposed architecture and protocol toolbox will be validated through extensive simulation testing and implemented in a federated network of sensor nodes and smart objects in smart home and building automation application domains.

The concept of VSNs introduces a truly new and dynamic collaboration paradigm. In order to cope with the augmented collaboration requirements of this new paradigm, VITRO will pay special attention on issues like seamless connectivity, energy-efficiency and operational reliability, as well as trusted routing in large-scale harsh environments. VITRO will evaluate network-coding techniques and follow an application-aware approach, leading to better utilization of the medium. The proposed MAC will be simulated and evaluated to show minimization of transmission collisions and improved communication performance in terms of network throughput and packet loss reduction. In Network Layer, VITRO will combine ideas and work in progress, mainly from the IETF ROLL workgroup, and propose a novel trust-aware routing protocol implementation, suitable for VSN, consisting of thousands of smart objects with dynamically shared resources. Furthermore, we will propose an innovative middleware solution to be applied, in order to discover where resources are located, categorize them, and extract semantics information based on their syntactic descriptions. For the purposes of VITRO, an enriched version of WSN-SOA supporting virtualization will be developed. Finally, we will use the population protocol model and its extensions to model and verify specific properties of the implemented VITRO protocols. This will help us obtain a first insight in the behaviour of the system and identify which characteristics need to be included."